Norths Collective advances its digital transformation targets

Norths Collective said it has now entered “the ROI” phase of its digital transformation journey as it aims to understand the fundamental benefits of its work.

The club, which has its roots in the former North Sydney Leagues club, has been working through a digital transformation that started around 2018.

It has so far seen the club launch a new members app, and innovation and marketing specialist Robert Lopez said the collective has “now moved into a new phase of our journey.”

Lopez told iTnews that “the phase we're looking at now is really understanding the ROI [return on investment] on our digital transformation journey”.

This entails looking into “what bottom-line value this journey has delivered". It is hoped this work will be completed by December.

“We've spent plenty of money to date, but it's important for us to understand what that's given back to the business so that we can get future investments and continue to grow," Lopez said.

Lopez said the business, which operates eight hospitality venues and two fitness centres across Sydney and the Gold Coast, originally set out with “three objectives” for its transformation. 

“The first being a single view of the customer … the second was getting smarter with the data, centralising our data, making better business decisions through visualisations and analytics, and the third was getting smarter with our marketing."

He said the business “initially from a KPI perspective … started off by looking at engagement statistics, open rates, click-through rates, visitation and transaction [data]”.

Last year, the collective progressed to setting "campaign level objectives" and using Salesforce's Marketing Cloud “to target the right group”.

This year, it is working to visualise the ROI on its digital transformation spend.

Norths Collective’s digital Integration and analytics specialist Liam Webb added the organisation is now considering “what the best next steps are” for its transformation journey.

“We’ve got Marketing Cloud [and] Service Cloud, we've had it for three-to-four years now. It's in the maturity stage and now we're reassessing what else can we add to that just to keep the ROI ticking up on that one.”

Across its work so far, Norths Collective has seen a 45 percent rise in online event sales and a 20 percent boost in membership.

Wider goals and app adoption   

Lopez said the collective's Heroku-powered members app has also entered a fifth phase, with a focus on increased personalisation. The team is also working on member adoption of the app.

Despite early days, member uptake of the app has been successful according to Norths Collective, with the business witnessing 1000 users sign up over a two-week period, beating initial expectations.

The app has roughly 1750 downloads with Lopez stating the new goal is to hit 2000 by the end of October.

With total club membership reaching over 60,000, the main demographic using the app is those in the 46-55 age bracket.

It's hoped by 2025 more than half of Norths Collective members will be active in the app, however Lopez said it was important to set realistic goals.

He added one major drawcard to the app is the digital membership card as well as gaming capabilities such as a "spin-the-wheel" feature.

Further afield

The theme for transformation next year isn't decided but is shaping up as a "part two" for integration work.

Lopez said the company has a “whole array of future integrations” planned for next year “which will only enhance the current single source of customer truth and customer 360 [view]" that it has built so far.

Norths Collective also said its ambitions to use beacon technology are still in motion.

This will allow the club to send real-time messaging based on location, however Lopez said it was unlikely to be in place next year due to other competing needs.

“We're currently trying to [drive up] engagement and adoption; we're getting good adoption numbers. Next year we’ll ... start personalising in real-time," he said.

“Then we'll be able to look at virtual beacons. That's going to become another marketing tool in our belt.”

Lopez also said the company’s marketing teams are currently using generative AI for content creation.

He said the collective is “excited” to start implementing Salesforce Einstein into its “Marketing Cloud realm”.

“From a regulatory perspective, we want to start using AI to start understanding customer behaviour, how we can offer better customer service as well, and we're now at the phase where we're going to be introducing or integrating our call centre with our Service Cloud,” Lopez said.

Lopez said he was “excited about what [generative AI] can do for our organisation” and how it could help its service teams.

Webb said he was looking forward to exploring Salesforce Einstein Copilot capabilities “in terms of helping build code rollout and the implementation side. 

Kate Weber attended Salesforce's Dreamforce 2023 conference in San Francisco as a guest of Salesforce.